> I'm still not entirely sure why high > res scans look better on a screen only capable of displaying 72dpi.
I assume you mean when you scan them at 27xx and then downsize them to 72dpi, that comes out far better than scanning them AT 72dpi? That's easy, if that's the case. The PS software does a better job at decimation than your scanner does! Not all scanners are bad at decimating though, mine happens to do a better job than PS does...but it's a pretty high end scanner, and made specifically TO output at variable resolutions, though it can only scan at 5080/2540/1200... It has three built-in DSP processors (one Digital Signal Processor per channel) that take care of decimating the data to give outstanding reduced resolution scans.
